


Time Effect: Coda

by oOAchilliaOo



Series: Time Effect [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23776195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oOAchilliaOo/pseuds/oOAchilliaOo
Summary: She didn’t think she’d ever see him again, not after the last time. But it seems that the Doctor has one more adventure in mind for her.Her last as it turns out.
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard, Kaidan Alenko/Shepard
Series: Time Effect [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1673050
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	Time Effect: Coda

She can feel the wound in her side… leaking. Slowly, so slowly, her life force oozing out of her by degrees. Yet, she can’t quite summon the energy to care.

The sky above her is ablaze. Fire and stars and ships and destruction.

But she’s won. She’s _won._

It’s only as she’s hovering on the edge of consciousness that she realises she won’t live to see what happens next. How her decision, her final choice affects the galaxy, her friends, her comrades.

She regrets it, just a little bit, but the regret is far outweighed by the knowledge that she won’t be waiting for _him,_ like she promised she would be.

There can’t be much moisture left in her dying body, but somehow, she’s still able to feel the few tears that slip down her cheeks.

She’s about to pass out, to finally go gently into that good night, hopefully permanently this time, when she hears it. A specific, distinctive sound that she’s only heard once before but could never forget.

The whining screech gets steadily louder and louder as the box shape begins to form around her. Within seconds, she’s lying, not on the wreckage of the Citadel, but on the deck of the Doctor’s time ship.

“Up you get, Commander,” the Doctor says from the console in the centre of the room and she does. Easily.

It seems impossible, but just as they had when the Crucible/Citadel Intelligence had raised her to its home, her injuries suddenly seem… less significant.

At least she can breathe now.

She glances around. The Doctor’s new time ship is… incredible. New, only because this can’t possibly be the small wooden box she’d once seen in the Normandy’s cargo bay, can it? It’s… huge, far larger than the dimensions of the box would have allowed.

He must have gotten a new ship since their last meeting. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Like she had.

“Doctor?” she asks. Not that she _isn’t_ grateful that he’s here, it’s just that she hasn’t seen him since that day on the SR1, and his timing seems… significant.

“I can’t save you,” he says, cutting directly to the point. She appreciates that, he certainly hadn’t been very ‘to the point’ the last time they’d met. “You have to die here, now, and if you don’t, the timeline will collapse and destroy the universe.”

Her impending death is not a shock. Even before she’d felt her lifeblood seeping from the many, many wounds she’d sustained, she’d believed, since the moment that Cerberus had brought her back, that she was living on borrowed time. If she _had_ to die, dying to save the galaxy seems like a pretty good way to go.

But she is curious as to why the Doctor is here, if not to save her.

He grins.

“There’s something you should see first, and as long as you’re with me you’re both dying and not dying, see?”

She doesn’t, but she can’t deny that putting off her death for a time, even a short time, has a certain appeal.

“Brilliant!” He takes her half-shrug/half-nod as assent. “Right then. Here we go!”

She watches him as he dances around the console, hitting buttons and levers that look nothing like a flight console in the slightest. He looks exactly the same as he had the last time she’d seen him. Except for his eyes, there’s a loss there, of the kind she understood too well.

She shoots him a careful, searching look. One that uses her years of leadership experience and her razor-sharp, rigorously honed instincts.

“Where’s Rose?” she asks in as neutral a tone as possible.

The effect is immediate. He stiffens, knuckles whitening on the controls, his gaze dropping to the console as if it’s the only thing that makes sense to him anymore.

“Gone.”

She doesn’t press, nor does she need to know the details. That kind of loss speaks for itself. 

“So,” she says, aware that if she doesn’t lighten the mood they’re heading for a _very_ long awkward silence. “Where are we going?”

As quickly as the sorrowful, aching, lost expression had appeared on his face, it vanishes. Replaced with the joyous boyish expression she’d barely tolerated back when they’d first met.

“Everywhere.”

He grins, pulling a lever that sends his ship ricocheting all over the place, to the point that even she loses her balance. When she rights herself it’s to find the Doctor flat on the floor as well, only he’s still grinning.

She isn’t sure why he’s so gleeful about it all. It seems to her that having a ship whose flight path routinely throws its occupants onto the floor is a _little_ impractical. Especially since, given the Doctor’s demeanour and his habit of pissing people off, an attack could easily be imminent upon landing.

She files that titbit away in case it becomes useful later.

In case she ever needs to fight the Doctor.

Then, of course, she realises that she’ll never face the Doctor, or any other enemy ever again.

Her time is done.

“After you.” The Doctor gestures towards the door.

The first thing she notices when she steps onto the planet’s surface is that somehow, impossibly his ship _is_ the little blue box. She walks around it just to be sure that the box isn’t somehow just an entryway but no, from the outside, it’s only a small, wooden box.

She finds the Doctor watching her with a look of gleeful mischief on his face. He seems to be waiting for her to ask, but she refuses to give him the satisfaction.

“It’s bigger on the inside,” he explains after a long moment, as if such a thing weren’t entirely impossible. “Don’t worry about it.”

She decides not to. Even if she were technologically inclined (which she isn’t) she doubted even Tali could understand. Besides, he seems far too pleased with himself about it.

Instead, she turns to survey the planet they’ve landed on.

And realises where they are.

The Shroud she remembers was singular, isolated. A lone tower amidst the rubble of Tuchanka, and the only structure for miles.

The Shroud in front of her is considerably less lonesome. The city that now surrounds the building is so dense that despite the wildly different architecture styles it had still taken her a few moments to actually pick it out.

“This is Tuchanka,” she says, fully aware that she’s stating the obvious but too awed to do anything else.

“Yep.” The Doctor says drawing out the syllable.

“And… and what _year_ is it?” she asks.

His claims of being a time traveller are clearly entirely true. This cannot possibly be the Tuchanka of _her_ time.

“Ooh, about three hundred years into your future, give or take?” The Doctor states it casually, as if he says such things every day. Which, he probably does, if she thinks about it. 

But the city before them is wonderous, and somehow right now that is a far harder concept to get her head around than the concept of time travel.

Shuttles of every kind circle the city, dipping in and out of the traffic in a way that reminds her of the sky-roads around Citadel. There’s no sign of the half-destroyed buildings, broken bits of masonry and pipe that covered the surface of the planet in hermemories.

Instead, the buildings are whole, built in an eclectic mix of solid, sturdy styles that she’d recognise as Krogan anywhere. Bright advertisements litter the skyline, and a faint base beat echoes out from what looks to be an upscale club, the sound mixed in with that of a faint garbled commentary from some kind of sporting event.

It is _magnificent_.

And even more stunning than the infrastructure is the band of green that surrounds the outskirts of the city.

Greenery.

On Tuchanka.

They’re doing well, she realises. In three hundred years this will be a reality or rather, _is_ a reality. Whatever. The point was that she’d been right. Right to cure the genophage, right to champion the Krogan people because God, look at what they’d done with the chance she and Wrex and Bakara had given them.

It’s only now that she understands the gift the Doctor is giving her. She gets to _see._ She’ll die, but at least she’ll die knowing what her life had bought for the rest of the galaxy.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, she turns to thank him, but the words die as soon as she sees the understanding in his expression. It’s almost as if he already knows what she wants to say but would rather she didn’t actually speak the words.

In a moment, the expression vanishes, replaced by the cocky grin she remembers from their first meeting.

“Shall we take a closer look?”

He doesn’t wait for her to respond before sticking his hand in his pockets and strolling casually towards the city. 

There’s a brightly lit sign proclaiming ‘Solus City’ and she can’t help but smile to see the real saviour of the Krogan people honoured in such a permanent way.

The city itself is just as full of life as it had seemed from the outside. There are adverts for Krogan vids, Krogan shop owners, Krogan sports stars, actors and singers. An explosion of culture the like of which she could never have imagined.

They’re almost in the city centre when she sees it. A giant hundred-foot statue… of her.

Rendered in a typically Krogan style, the statue appears to be hewn from a singular solid piece of rock. It’s rough, but it’s unmistakably her.

It stands in the middle of the plaza looking towards the shroud, which is a mile or so away. In the space between the two there’s a long, thin artificial lake surrounded by a sparkling white marble walkway. A tableau that wouldn’t have been out of place on the Presidium.

When they get closer (not that she especially _wanted_ to get closer to an enormous statue of herself but the Doctor seemed to have other ideas) she could see that the walkway was inscribed with the names of all those who’d died in the war. Hundreds, thousands of Krogan names. People who died on Palaven, in the attempt to get her and Mordin _to_ the Shroud, on Earth, and there, right at the base of her statue, Mordin’s name next to her own.

Below her name are the words ‘Battle Master and Sister to the Krogan people’.

“They don’t forget you know.” The Doctor appears beside her. “They don’t _ever_ forget what you did.”

She swallows another lump in her throat, unable to speak.

“Want to see more?” he asks.

***

Hours later, they’re on Rannoch.

There are houses, actual _houses,_ everywhere. Big, airy and made of stone. Solid, permanent fixtures of the landscape, as immovable as the mountains that frame them.

They stand at the edge of a town square, because to her utter delight, there’s a _town_ and it has a _square_. A cute little park with rough-hewn stone benches and bright blue plants separate them from the memorial.

She can’t quite see the details from here or read the text but as she glances past the memorial, she recognises the hulking shadow in the distance. There are children clambering over it, just distinguishable at the edge of her vision.

This is where she fought the Reaper.

And the memorial is almost precisely where Legion died.

A woman sits in front of it, her chair floating a few inches from the ground. She still wears a suit, but no mask, no gloves. Her hands are gnarled, her skin wrinkled, and though Shepard had only ever seen her face once, she still recognises it immediately.

“Grandma vas Normandy?” A small child totters up to her carrying a couple of dilapidated flowers. “I picked these for you.”

Tali smiles and reaches out to take the flowers, feeling its petals with her fingertips, inhaling its scent without air filters.

“Thank you, Nehma.” Her voice is gravelly, older and wiser.

“Did you _really_ fight in the war?” the child blurts out. “Reghar said it wasn’t true but _I_ think it is… Mama said I wasn’t supposed to ask though.”

Tali smiles. “Yes child, I fought in the war. So did your grandfather, in fact.”

“ _Really?”_ The child asks, eyes wide like it’s something amazing, something impossible.

Something from a long long time ago.

Tali chuckles. “Yes really, and do you know…”

“There’s no need to terrify the child with war stories, Tali.”

Shepard’s gaze shoots across the park at the familiar-sounding voice. Sure enough, Garrus Vakarian is striding across the grass. He’s still walking tall, powerful, but his fringe is drooping slightly, and his once bright blue facial markings have dulled to a bluish grey. He’s also limping slightly on his right leg.

“She _asked,_ Vakarian,” Tali shoots back, her eyes alight with her old fire. “You just don’t want them to know that you spent the entire war calibrating Normandy’s gun!”

Garrus bristles, but in a fairly good-humoured way.

“I did a _little_ more than that” he protests. Then he smiles down at her. “Come on. Shaeala almost has dinner ready.”

Tali nods and Garrus wheels her across the square in the direction of a particularly large house with a perfect view of the mountains.

Their granddaughter totters along behind them.

***

She knows exactly where she is the next time they land. Knows the exact colour of the walls, recognises the precise dimensions of the room down to the seemingly haphazard stacks of crates.

This is Normandy’s cargo bay. 

She barely has time to react to that fact before the door sweeps open and someone strides in.

She recognises him instantly, even as she quickly ducks out of sight. He looks older, of course, wrinkles lining his face here and there, but he still has his trademark mohawk, even if his tattoos are hidden beneath a proper uniform jacket. One that has three stripes on the shoulder.

James Vega, Captain of the Normandy.

“You realise this isn’t going to work, right?”

“Ah, come on, Esteban,” Vega says to Cortez, following him in. “It’ll be fiiiiine….”

The way he drew out the word fine made her immediately concerned. But at least James been smart enough to keep Cortez around. _Someone_ had to stop him doing crazy things like crashing shuttles, after all.

“A covert run on a Blue Sun base? Seems risky.”

Vega shrugs. “Shepard always pulled off risky.”

“You’re not Shepard.” Cortez points out.

“I’m close enough,” Vega shoots back, with just a hint of his old stubbornness and fire. But it’s a tempered stubbornness, aged, refined into something more useful. “ _Someone_ has to be the hero. Might as well be me.”

Cortez softens. “I miss her too.”

Vega’s shoulders slump, proof that Cortez had hit upon exactly the right thing.

“You know what she’d say if she were here.”

Vega snorts. “Probably the same thing she said last time I did something stupid right?”

“Almost definitely.”

Hidden behind the ammo crates, Shepard herself is inclined to agree.

“Alright, I’ll… come up with something else.”

Cortez claps him on the shoulder. “Good man. Shall we toast?”

Vega smiles. “Rules is rules.”

He pulls out a bottle of Serrice Ice brandy, hidden in Cortez’s procurement console. Cortez reaches behind Vega’s workout gear and retrieves three shot glasses, one painted with an N7 insignia.

Vega fills all three glasses. “To Shepard.”

“To Shepard.” Cortez echoes.

They both clink their glasses against the N7 one and drink.

“Captain?” a voice crackles through the comm. It sounds familiar, yet she can’t quite place it.

“Go ahead, Williams,” Vega answers.

Williams? One of Ashley’s sisters? She’d like that to be true. There was a certain amount of poetic justice in a Williams sister joining the Normandy crew and surviving. 

“We’re coming up on the base.”

“Copy that, Sarah. On my way.”

She waits until they’ve left the cargo bay, then rises from her hiding place to take the shot they’d left for her.

“To you, boys.”

She raises the glass towards the door briefly before swallowing the last shot of brandy she will ever drink.

***

They’re in a museum and the Doctor has given her an old baseball cap to pull down over her eyes. Good thing too, since her image is everywhere here. It’s odd really, pieces of her life behind glass cages with little placards in front of them.

Unlike most museums, everything here is astonishingly accurate, down to the last detail. There’s even a slideshow of images over which a blow-by-blow account of the Battle of the Citadel is narrated. The narration is a little… flowery for her tastes. She can’t quite remember exactly but she’s ninety-eight percent certain that she hadn’t charged the Citadel tower ‘with the grit and determination of a hero’. Mostly, she’d just been trying to stay alive long enough to _get_ to Saren while the Geth rained hell on them.

But the flowery language gives her one clue as to who might be responsible for the museum’s accuracy. There is, after all, only one person she knows who likes to catalogue and study history, one who had already tried to preserve knowledge for future generations.

Sure, enough when they reach the Prothean wing of the museum (which incidentally is one of the larger sections) they find a crowd gathered around a familiar Asari.

“Of course, the Protheans were a complex species,” she’s saying. “We can by no means be certain that Javik represented the ‘typical’ Prothean but they were certainly not the paragons we believed them to be.”

“Is it possible that other Protheans survived?” asks a Turian in the crowd.

“It is unlikely,” Liara replies. “But if there’s one thing I learned from travelling with Commander Shepard, it was to always expect the impossible.”

They move on before Liara can recognise Shepard, walking past the exhibition on the destruction of the Normandy and the one on the Collector Base before they come to what the Doctor describes as the museum’s ‘crowning glory’.

In a large wide-open space, surrounded by galleries on all sides, sits the Normandy SR1. Or, more accurately, _parts_ of the Normandy SR1. Reproduced in perfect detail. The CIC lies in centre of the room, with her cabin and the Mako in their own separate areas at either end. Parts of the hull-plating line the walls, and the ceiling has been painted to look like the stars she’d once flown past.

In a weird way, it’s _almost_ like she’s flying again.

A plaque at the entrance explains that the wreckage was recovered from Alchera and brought to the museum, where repair and reconstruction began. After three years of intense conservation effort, she was opened to visitors in October 2683, five hundred years to the day since her destruction.

The exhibit says that it is almost entirely composed of original SR1 pieces and, while of course she can’t possibly _feel_ that it’s true… she can. This is her first ship. Destroyed and then preserved, for who knows how long?

The Doctor probably knows, but she’s not sure she wants to ask him.

There’s a photo opportunity marked at the galaxy map interface, one that advises patrons to pose facing the map ‘just like Commander Shepard would have done’.

There’s another marked at Joker’s pilot chair where children (or childish adults) can sit in the chair and mime flying her. A shot of Joker’s run on Sovereign plays on the viewscreen above. All three of the pilot and co-pilot chairs are present, though only Joker’s was left in the original. Kaidan’s co-pilot chair was ripped out into the vacuum of space in the same blast that sent her flying out of the ship and into the endless black. She has no idea what became of the seat she used to lounge in.

She has so many memories of sitting here, just the three of them. Talking shit between missions. Now, there are children clamouring over the seats while frustrated parents try to curb their enthusiasm. It’s a bizarre but good feeling.

Her own mission logs are playing on a loop in her cabin, where an N7 hoodie (which, hell, based on the accuracy of everything _else_ in this place _could_ very wellbe hers, but she wouldn’t bet on it) has been artfully draped over the chair in front of the terminal.

Oddly, all the other patrons appear to have temporarily deserted this room. If she blocks out the ambient noise of the masses and the faint warbling of Joker’s Sovereign run repeating, she can almost _almost_ believe that she’s back aboard the _actual_ SR1. That if she steps outside, she’ll find Kaidan, younger, his hair un-lined with grey, tapping away at that old console.

In a weird way, she’d give almost anything to go back.

It beats dying in the rubble of the Citadel.

Further into the exhibit, there’s a long corridor with the phrase ‘The Hall of Heroes’ embossed on the entrance. Inside, familiar dossiers are projected onto the wall at set intervals.

She wanders down the line, pausing at each in turn. Ashley is first, displaying her service history along with lengthy treatise on Virmire. Then Mordin, Thane (mostly redacted), Legion and EDI…

Wrex’s dossier includes details of his actions after the war. That after ruling for many years, he retired to live peacefully on Tuchanka passing the title of Urdnot Clan Leader to Grunt before being the first Krogan to die of old age.

Grunt’s states that among the many actions he took in rebuilding Tuchanka, he paid particular attention to art and culture programs, something he claimed he did in order to honour Mordin Solus. 

She isn’t surprised to see that Jack stayed at Grissom Academy, ushering hundreds of students through the Ascension programme. Neither is she surprised to see that Miranda, after helping the reconstruction of Earth, set up a research base aimed at using the project Lazarus data to help war veterans and those with long-term disabilities and well… anyone that everyone else would consider beyond saving.

Garrus and Tali’s dossiers both mention their work in rebuilding their worlds before settling on Rannoch.

Vega’s mentions his time as captain of the Normandy.

Joker’s states that he ultimately became an instructor at flight school.

Finally, she comes to Kaidan’s dossier.

She’s not entirely sure that she wants to read it.

There’s the expected part about commanding the Normandy home, followed by a lengthy list of ways in which he’d helped rebuild both Earth and the joint galactic inter-species military force. Until finally he ultimately ‘retired’ by becoming humanity’s councillor. 

It doesn’t say if he ever married.

Based on the lengthy list of deeds without mention of an actual retirement she suspects he didn’t.

But he didn’t _waste_ his life. The dossier at least proves that.

She takes what comfort she can.

***

They’re outside a hospital room watching the birth of Jacob’s daughter.

They’re in the back of a new class at flight school hearing Joker tell outlandish stories of the Normandy in which his own part in events is _considerably_ enlarged.

They’re on Thessia hearing Samara laugh over tea with Rila.

They’re in the crowd at graduation, close enough to see Jack crying as one by one her students step onto the stage.

They’re outside the window at Christmas watching as Miranda passes a perfectly wrapped, incredibly large present to Oriana while her family look on.

They are in a hundred places at the same time and at no time at all.

Finally, they stop in a hospital. She doesn’t know where, it’s not Huerta or any hospital she’s been in before and at first, she wonders why they’re here. 

Then the Doctor points at a specific room and everything stops.

He looks so… old. So tired. His once black hair now white, his once strong body frailer, smaller, almost dwarfed by the bed and the number of machines he’s plugged into.

But she’d still recognise him anywhere.

“Kaidan,” she breathes.

“He’s dying,” the Doctor says quietly. “But he still has a few minutes left. Go to him.”

She’s known he’s dying from the moment she saw him, mostly because it was the only possible reason for the Doctor to have brought her here.

“Why?” she asks, not quite ready to enter the room. “Why do _this_ for me?”

He gives her a long sorrowful look that somehow shows every inch of both their pain. It’s a little terrifying how well he understands, and, God, she hopes she never learns the cause of the haunted look in his eyes. 

“Because goodbyes are _important,_ Commander. And you deserved to know.”

He doesn’t seem inclined to say anything else, so she supposes there’s nothing she can do but enter the room.

Her mind is awash with memories of Horizon, every possible reaction and outcome flitting through her head as she tries in vain to think of the right thing to say. 

Of course, the one reaction she doesn’t anticipate is the one she receives.

“Hey, there you are.” His voice weak but still recognisably _his._

“You… expected me?” She blinks, completely caught off guard.

“Of course.” He coughs once, then twice, a great hacking cough, and when he draws in air, she can _hear_ the rattle in his lungs. “Always thought I’d see you again at the end.”

Her throat closes up, her heart breaking in her chest and God she can _feel_ it.

“I missed you.” His words break her heart a second time.

“I missed you too.” She parcels her own emotions away; this isn’t about her. It’s about him. If he thinks she’s some… angel, come to guide him to the afterlife, than that is what she will be.

“What’s it like?” he asks, after a moment. “Where you are?”

She pauses. It’s not in her nature to lie to him but, if she were dying (which she supposes she is in a way, just so much slower) she wouldn’t want to hear the truth.

“It’s beautiful. Peaceful.”

She takes a seat at the edge of his bed. He smiles, the wrinkles around his eyes crinkling. They are deeper of course, the wrinkles, but the shape of the laughter lines are still the same. 

“I don’t think it’ll be long now.”

“I know.” She takes his hand in hers. “But I’m here. I’ll wait.”

And she does, she waits until his grip on her hand lessens, waits until the various monitors start beeping, waits until his very last breath… and then, before the doctors can sweep in, she stalks out of the room, heading straight for the Doctor.

She stops precisely three paces in front of him.

“I’m ready.”

The Doctor nods like he understands, like he’d expected it. Wordlessly, she follows him back into the blue box.

***

Their next stop is the final one.

Back in the ruins of the Citadel mere seconds after they’d left.

The pain comes roaring back in a wave that almost cripples her. But she holds on, just for a few moments. Just long enough to remember all she’d seen, long enough to remember that her crew are _okay_.

That the galaxy survives and _thrives._

She remembers the city called Solus on Tuchanka, the town square on Rannoch, the museum full of her stories, the Normandy under its new captain.

She smiles…

And finally, as the sound of the Doctor’s time ship fades away, Commander Shepard draws her last breath...


End file.
